


Chrysopoeia

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Swordspoint Series - Ellen Kushner
Genre: Bloodplay, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Knifeplay, M/M, Major Character Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:06:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28028247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: It struck Alec that this would have been much easier if their positions were reversed. Richard would have known what to do if he’d been dragged back here with a hole in his gut. He was quite simply not supposed to be the one on this end of the equation. In fact, it was possible he had done something very bad to deserve this.
Relationships: Alec Campion/Richard St Vier
Comments: 28
Kudos: 43
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Chrysopoeia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SpookyDarlings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpookyDarlings/gifts).



> NB: all the self-harm mentioned in this story is canon-typical.

He had gone out to get fish and a few pocketsful of vegetables on the edge of turning, and it was snowing when he got back to the boardinghouse and found that the stairs to their rooms — his rooms, Richard’s rooms, what have you — were thronged with people. Not everybody knew him (still) so it was somewhat of a trial to get up the stairs, even though he kept saying, loudly, with a poorly applied gilt of politeness, “Excuse me, I live here.” Some people even gave him an ugly look for that, which was extremely irritating considering every step toward the door had him more and more on edge. The truth was that if it was just that Richard had won everybody who cared would be celebrating in the bar. There were a couple of reasons why people might be thronging the hall but there was one most likely of all. When you lived down here you saw people dying all the time, but the particularly unique and bloody death of a person heretofore considered unkillable never seemed to lose its luster.

Lo and behold, the door to their rooms was open and Marie was serving as bouncer and confessor. Alec tapped into some old muscle memory and carefully composed his face. “Can I come in,” he said. Even though this was ridiculous, because this was his own house. Maybe not on the paperwork (if there was any), but it was. At the very least, he had no place else to go.

Marie stepped aside, not unreluctantly. Distantly in the back of his mind Alec heard Richard saying, people might like you a little more if you tried a little harder. “He’s not dead,” Marie said.

“He’s not?”

“Nearly.”

Alec put the groceries on the counter and went into the bedroom. The man was in the bed, surrounded by various surgeons and healers and augurs and witches and things. Clearly someone had gone and roused everybody in Riverside with the barest credentials and Marie had decided to throw them all at the problem. The problem evidently being the quantity of blood all over everything. Chiefly of course it was all over the bed — their bed, Alec supposed — and it was all over Richard. A funny thing about blood was that it was often darker than you expected it to be, especially when it was coming out. The scab inside Alec’s thigh itched. His mind felt horribly, blessedly clear. It often smelled like blood in this room, but not this much. So much blood it made the world smell humid and almost like the sea. Then someone said, “Who are you?”

The augur had gotten up from casting bones on the floor, and the surgeon looked up from his cutting. It was impossible to tell what the wound was but it was in the chest or gut or something and it was bad and the blood was nearly black. It would never come out of the floor and certainly not out of the blankets, Alec thought. Then, strangely, the fish’ll go bad. “I live here,” he said. “Is he dying?”

“No,” said one of the witches, as the surgeon said “Yes.”

He had hated them in school, really he had, they were so insufferable, but Alec turned to the surgeon and said, “can I help?”

“Have you scissors? Tongs? Alcohol?”

“Scissors for my hair,” Alec said, “and plain corn whiskey.”

“Get them. And all the linens in the house, get them here.”

He did as he was told. He wished he had listened when Richard was explaining to him some basics of anatomy. You had to be somewhat of an anatomist, he’d explained, not as good a surgeon maybe, but good enough, if you wanted to be a swordsman, because you had to understand what you were aiming at. Richard liked to kill quick, which Alec knew meant he didn’t like to kill at all. It wasn’t just about slicing willy-nilly, Richard had explained, once Alec had gathered the wherewithal to ask him about it. He really wanted to ask about the other thing but that was a long time coming yet. Mostly because he’d thought Richard would say no.

Back in the bedroom the witches were mumbling and praying and a tossed fox jawbone rolled up against Alec’s foot. The surgeon’s arms were bloody past the elbow. “Good,” he said, catching sight of Alec with all the goods cradled in his arms. “Pour the whiskey over the scissors and help me cut his clothes off.”

This might have signified an affront to his virtue or something, if he had any. But of course it was obvious, he’d said he’d lived here and there was only one bed. He knelt beside Richard in the bed, this not altogether an unfamiliar circumstance, except that there was so much blood the blankets didn’t absorb it all and it ran into the divot of his knee. Richard’s eyes were shut but behind the lids they were moving quite quickly. And he was white as a ghost. The surgeon had simply pushed his clothing away from the wound. Unfortunately, Richard had gone to the fight wearing his favorite shirt, for good luck, so he said. Sorry, Alec thought, running the scissors through it.

When that task was done there were some others. First it was just, hold the pressure here. Then it was holding the flaps of skin back and all these other horrific things that Alec didn’t know he was physically capable of doing until he did them.

By the time he looked up again it was near dark and everyone had left. Alec lit the lantern by the bedside so that the surgeon could finish the sutures. His hands looked like a meatpacker’s. He remembered the fish on the counter in the kitchen, and, though he didn’t think he had it in him to butcher anything after this, he said to the surgeon, “Are you hungry?”

He was looked at a bit quizzically. He had almost forgotten what he must have looked like to this person. He corralled his face again. “I need to get back home,” said the surgeon. “It’s late.”

“Of course. What do I do now?”

“Change the dressing every few hours. The cleanest cloths you have. I’ll bring medicine by tomorrow. The stitches can come out in a few weeks. They might even come out on their own by then. In the meantime, opium for pain. Keep him comfortable. He can sip broth or water.”

“Right,” said Alec, feeling it all go through his mind like a sieve.

“Boil that fish carcass for a couple hours,” said the surgeon, pulling on his overcoat over his bloody arms. “That’ll do him some good.”

Alec walked him to the door. It was dark in the kitchen and the fish stunk. They shook their bloody hands. “If you ever need a job,” said the surgeon, not quite meeting his eyes, “I’m in Honey Street,” and Alec nodded but did not quite manage to close the door all the way before he started laughing. And when he was done laughing, he found that he was very alone.

He cut the head off the fish and filleted it and put all the bones and skin with the head in a pot of water to boil with all the vegetables he could find. While it was going he fried the fish fillets and ate them with his fingers out of the skillet. Every five minutes or so he went pacing nervously into the bedroom to confirm that Richard was still breathing. He would have changed the sheets, if they had had another set. The blood was going brown. Outside in the dark fog an eddying flurry drifted against the light.

Alec was no stranger to blood, really. It was usually his own blood and he usually liked seeing it, and how it was always darker than you’d expect when there was a lot of it, and brighter and orangier when there was just a little. He went to the basin and cleaned his hands, once and then again, with a last sliver of soap, and then he sat beside the bed in the secondhand leather chair Richard had bought around the time of the Sherry job, picking the skin around his fingernails. The scab inside his thigh was bothering him, but Richard had instructed him in no uncertain terms not to touch it overmuch. Since when was he in the business of doing exactly as Richard said? Maybe that was the last thing Richard would ever tell him — in the morning as he was going out the door. Stop itching, it’ll scar or get infected or worse. I want it to scar, Alec thought about saying. Obviously! Otherwise why would I have asked you to do it? Then the door shut, and he’d thought they could have a nice fight about it later that would end in sex or threatening to jump out the window or both, and then he had gone to the market to try and get himself killed, and then this.

It struck him that this would have been much easier if their positions were reversed. Richard would have known what to do if he’d been dragged back here with a hole in his gut. He was quite simply not supposed to be the one on this end of the equation. In fact, it was possible he had done something very bad to deserve this.

\--

The first time they’d had sex, Alec had been surprised by just about everything about it. This was a sensation that he hated, so after all was said and done instead of just lying there like a dead fish and feeling washed over by the crushing waves of surprise, he got up and investigated the swords in their stand by the bed. Richard, for his part, reached for him, mostly performatively, letting his hand slip off Alec’s thigh. “Are they very sharp,” Alec asked.

“Of course they are,” said Richard. The moon through the window around the sharp spines of the tenements slipped over the shape of him in the bed. He was too smart to think this was just a random pickup at Rosalie’s. Wasn’t he? “They have to be sharp to do the job.”

“The job?”

Richard gave him that smile that meant, why are we talking about this when you already know?

Alec touched the blade of one of the swords with the lightest pressure he could muster despite temptation. He was very good by now with blades, but he wasn’t a master. Not like Richard. In the fine metal his own reflection was distorted and strange.

“Come back to bed,” Richard said.

“Why?”

Bemusement played across his handsome face. Under the thin, rough sheets, Alec noticed that he was palming his crotch. “Isn’t it obvious,” he said.

In the dark, they lay beside each other and slowly it became dawn. Alec wondered why he couldn’t ask Richard the thing he had practiced asking Richard, asking his own reflection every time he came across dark glass before they had ever met. If you can’t ask him to kill you, it might be that you don't really want to die, he thought on the edge of sleep.

At first he convinced himself he was hanging around because he might someday work up the wherewithal to ask. Besides, Richard doted on him, which Alec recognized as his own form of penance. It took Richard killing a couple people in his defense before Alec realized they were a couple.

He was not one to get embroiled in this kind of arrangement. In fact, this was the exact opposite of why he had initially pursued Richard. He had no place else to go, that was part of it. Besides, it made sense for someone with his innate darkness to be the lover of a swordsman. Looking at it from outside, he might have called this complacency. From inside, he found that he enjoyed it, as much as anything could be enjoyed.

Anyway, after not so very long, Alec had gone on a tear about being treated like he was made of paper mache and being kid-gloved all the time, in order to get himself thrown across the bed and fucked silly, which was ultimately successful. It was almost good enough: Richard forewent his usual twenty minutes of prep and opened Alec up roughly with two fingers and a pea-sized dollop of tallow, then fairly speared him, a quick parry and an achingly deep thrust, so that for a minute the burning stretch suffused his entire being and he washed away… Nevertheless, upon coming back to himself, Alec spent much of the encounter tossing his head and writhing like an augur in convulsions in attempt to get Richard to pull his hair or rake fingernails down his back or something, which was ultimately unsuccessful. In the end they lay beside each other breathing hard. No other sound in the room except for the neighbors distantly fighting through the thin walls. Alec had come twice and was beside himself with rage. “I know you want me to hurt you,” Richard said, before Alec could say anything, “but I won’t do it.”

“Why not?”

Of course Alec knew he’d killed that woman. There were a handful of other reasons why he’d gone up to Richard at Rosalie’s that night, but that was the big one. “I won’t do it,” Richard said again.

“What if I want you to?”

“Especially if you want me to.”

“What if it hurts me worse that you don’t hurt me?”

Richard sighed. “I won’t have some kind of University thought experiment about this. Why can’t I just cherish you?”

Alec carefully composed his face. “Cherishing me might necessarily include acquiescing to some of the things that I desire.”

“What exactly is that you desire?”

“You can pull my hair,” Alec said. “I mean get a fist of it and _really_ pull. Or you can cut me if you want. I don’t know.”

“Cut you?”

“Just a little.” Richard was staring at him in the dark the way he sometimes did when Alec got too close to the fire or something. “You know your way around a blade. I trust you.”

Richard refused to entertain this anymore and turned over onto his side so that his back was to Alec but then he sighed and made a happy half-asleep sound when Alec ran a cool hand over the back of his neck and through his hair.

In the morning Alec was reading a really bad treatise on alchemy before the fire when Richard came in from the bedroom, evidently having been lying there thinking about things for a while. He was in his smallclothes and his hair was down and needed a wash. He practiced some attacks and defenses against the decimated wall and did a bunch of pushups and stretches so that eventually Alec just watched him, admiring how finely made he was, and the sweat beading at his temple. Then Richard cleaned his face at the basin and put on one of his nice silk robes, and then he said, “I’ll do it, on one condition.”

“What? What condition?”

“I’ll do what you asked. The condition is that I’m in control and if I want to stop then we stop.”

Was it possible that he did not know this was in itself a big turn-on? “Alright,” said Alec, turning back to his reading. “When?”

“I decide when,” said Richard. Alec shivered. Richard sat in the window seat all afternoon, sharpening his best blades, and with every rasp of the whetstone over the steel Alec shivered again.

Nothing happened for another week. When it did, Richard used one of his little knives. Alec thought it was very sweet. The blade was bright silver. He had spread Alec out and open in the bed so that the flat of the knife in the flickering lanternlight reflected a distortion of pink skin. Richard said, “Are you sure?”

“Stop asking if I’m sure.”

He went very slow making a careful mark against the inside of Alec’s thigh. The pain was bright and sweet as glass. Perhaps he cried. That funny thing definitely happened where his mouth ran away with him and he sang Richard’s several praises. For a moment Richard knelt between his legs and watched him bleed, and then he said, “Oh, Alec,” and fell on him, like a vampire bat or something, tasting the wound and just about everything else he could get his mouth on, so that when at last he manhandled Alec over onto his belly and got a fistful of his hair, Alec was already in a state of incredible jelly bliss. Richard hauled him to his shaky knees and leveraged grip at scalp and hip to work him like he was made of pulleys. Alec reached between his own legs and dug his fingernails into the wound, watching transfixedly as the blood welled up around his fingers and dripped down his thigh like wax from a guttering candle. If he had had his wits about him, he might have said that the pain wrapped around the pleasure and throttled it until it burst. Or else it was kind of a color theory thing: the deep, beautiful, brooding darkness of the pain made the pleasure incredibly bright, blinding, like the sun off the snow… He screamed into the pillow with every thrust like a particularly overzealous whore, hoping the neighbors heard, and at last came so hard it erased every bad thing that had ever happened to him for a split second. Then he came to and Richard was kissing all over his face and for a moment he thought he understood the meaning of love and couldn’t remember why such a thing should have disgusted him.

\--

He dreamed he was on a boat. Maybe the right word was ship. It must have been one of those massive man-o-war brigs he had seen sometimes as a child in the channel between the city and the distant islands, because in the entire dream he never once saw the sea. But he could feel it rocking. He was running around like a chicken with its head cut off, because he was supposed to be doing something but he couldn’t remember exactly what it was…

Then he woke up and it all came back to him slowly. The old blood smell in the bedroom tacky as low tide. And the drafty tenement house was shaking in the wind. There was a dark water stain spreading slowly across the ceiling. Outside the first stirrings of dawn. And in the bed, Richard snuffled like a sleeping animal.

It was like the silly riddle about a tree falling in the forest and making no sound. Of course somehow it was his fault, and as such he should have wanted to hurt himself. But, because nobody was looking at him — because the only person who cared was unconscious and couldn’t look at him — he found that he didn’t want to after all. So instead he got up and brushed his hair and tied it up, washed his face in the stale basin, and in the mirror attempted to make himself as presentable as possible so that he might beg an armful of linens off Marie or anybody else in this godforsaken town who didn’t want to kill him on sight. He returned in an hour’s time from Rosalie’s with a burlap bag full of bedsheets and other donations of various and sundry from assorted well-wishers, many of whom had been jostling for a look at a corpse the previous afternoon in the stairwell, to find that the surgeon had stopped by and left a brown glass eyedropper bottle outside the door with a card of scarcely legible handwritten instructions.

Inside, he checked that Richard was alive, and then he rolled his lover around like a beached whale to get the bloody sheets out from under him. There was going to be no salvaging the mattress and he resolved to worry about it another day. Once he had changed the linens he cut the clean bits out of the old ones to use for bandages and threw the rest on the embers of the fire. He opened the surgeon’s tincture bottle and dropped three drops over Richard’s wound and bandaged it again. Then he put the back of his hand on Richard’s forehead, which seemed like the right thing to do, but he couldn’t tell a difference between the temperatures of his own forehead and Richard’s. This seemed like a woefully inexact science, but it was probably good news.

Then he sat down again in the chair beside the bed. “Quite simply you are going to have to live,” Alec told Richard, feeling like a governess or a schoolmarm. “There is simply no alternative.”

Outside, it got dark quickly. The lanternlight guttered against the swords in their stand by the bed. For the first time in his memory, Alec thought he hated the sight of them. He felt a thrill of unrecognition of himself, the same as he had when he had left school.

Maybe we were always changing. He thought of his alchemy books and stared at the water stain in the ceiling, listening to Richard breathing and the wind outside rattling the shingles and whistling in the eaves. The same as coal could be changed into diamonds by pressure, so too could human spirits be transformed. Absently his hand strayed to the itchy scab inside his thigh. Much as alchemists sought the process which would transmute base metals into gold, perhaps this whole endeavor to forget himself and seek oblivion in the guts of the city had been an attempt to be transformed into something else. Would he like that person when he was finally revealed? He thought of how snake eggs looked like chicken eggs, sometimes, so that when the fine white shell and membrane broke instead of a fluffy little yellow bird you found a coiled slimy devil with a forked tongue. He didn't know yet and wasn’t exactly sure who he was going to be when this was over. We were always changing, he thought, almost said aloud, but we could never go too far from ourselves. Maybe this was wishful thinking. Maybe this was a proof against alchemy that would get him run out of any reputable university. Maybe —

“Stop itching,” said a familiar voice from somewhere close and far away. At first — this was just like him — he thought he was hearing god. But it was only the man in the bed, whose face had turned toward him on the ragged pillow.

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> this is a bit of a combination of both of spookydarlings' prompts - i hope it is to your liking my friend! 
> 
> chrysopoeia is the alchemical term for transforming base metals like lead into gold. i wasn't sure how to find the way into this story until i read [a drop of blood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13045086) by the_plaid_slytherin - this story is deeply in debt to theirs! 
> 
> i first read this book in 2015 at the recommendation of my friend's mom. i attempted to write a western AU several years ago but this was a lot more fun. thank you for the great prompts and the excuse to get back into this world!


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